In researching her novel, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell read prodigiously, relying heavily on one text in particular, Reconstruction in Georgia, written by the historian C. Mildred Thompson.
Upon Gone With the Wind’s publication in 1936, Thompson—the dean of Vassar College at the time—wrote to Mitchell to tell her that she had thoroughly enjoyed the novel, so much in fact that she had named her new puppy after Scarlett O’Hara. Mitchell wrote back, and the two white women, both from Georgia, became fast friends, bonding, no doubt, over their politics, patrimony and prose.
In Reconstruction in Georgia, for instance, Thompson dropped nuggets such as this:
The bad repute of the Freedman’s Bureau was due more directly to the political activities of its agents in 1867 and 1868, when they manipulated the helpless black voters for their own aggrandizement.
That prompted Mitchell to write in Gone With the Wind:
Formerly their white masters had given the orders. Now they had a new set of masters, the Bureau and the Carpetbaggers, and their orders were: ‘You’re just as good as any white man, so act that way. Just as soon as you can vote the Republican ticket, you are going to have the white man’s property! It’s as good as yours now. Take it, if you can get it!.
Thompson was the only female scholar in Columbia University’s Dunning School—named for the historian and political scientist William Archibald Dunning—that was among the first academic institutions to study Reconstruction by scrutinizing primary sources yet still got it agonizingly wrong, reaching more or less the same cartoonishly racist conclusions as the director D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation.
Just as W.E.B. Du Bois’ groundbreaking 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America exposed the Dunning School’s chicanery, Columbia University’s stunning announcement last week that it would yield to the Trump White House’s draconian demands to crack down on students protesting Israel’s genocide unmasked the fraud at the heart of higher learning in the United States. While many radical intellectuals and international scholars have long recognized that the primary mission of the university system in the U.S. is not to mitigate inequality but to reproduce it, Columbia’s complicity in effectively criminalizing the political speech that universities were created to both protect and promote, and is a confession that it is in it solely for the money.
After Columbia’s acquiesced to a list of demands that include banning face masks on campus, hiring 36 new security officers with enhanced powers of arrest, and appointing a senior vice provost to oversee the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine, Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that Columbia University is on track to regain the $400 million in federal funding that was snatched for what Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism maintained was the institution’s failure to address anti-Jewish racism on its Upper West Side campus in the 17 months since the Palestinian resistance’s military assault against Israel.
Katherine Franke, a former Columbia University law professor who was forced to resign because of her criticism of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, told Democracy Now on Monday:
I think it would be inaccurate to describe what Columbia and the federal government have entered into as an agreement. The federal government seized funds that they were legally obliged to deliver to Columbia researchers, and then issued a ransom note, saying, “We will consider negotiations further with you if you do the following things.”
Columbia considered it and did more than what the ransom note demanded, for which it got nothing in return. Normally, when someone is kidnapped or there’s some kind of ransom taken, you agree to the things in the ransom note, and then you get your stuff back. You get your money back. You get your person back. In this case, Columbia merely supplicated itself before the federal government, and then we hear Linda McMahon say, “Well, this is on the road, on track to what we’d like to see.” So we have no idea what comes next. But groveling before a bully, we all know, just encourages the bully.
Another scholar, Christopher Newfield, a British literature professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara recounted a conversation with an American scholar in a blogpost last weekend which raised the question: does Columbia’s betrayal delegitimize higher education in the U.S:
But reality sank in again. The American remarked that she saw the failure of Trump’s opposition as permanent. U.S. democracy was effectively over.
The people of the United States have grown up assuming that their institutions were set in stone, she said. That they could never crumble. No one could take them over. Now look. They don’t know what to do. They aren’t doing anything.
They are figuring it out now, I said. People are scrambling to reassess. Trump is taking their government apart. They’re yelling at their congresspeople in town halls. People are suing him right and left, which have blocked a lot of what he’s tried. When they get more of a grip they’ll start to fight.
They are years behind, the American pointed out. The right organized. They funded their institutes. They wrote a plan. They published the plan. The plan told everybody what they were going to do. He got inaugurated and they are doing the plan. The response of the Democrats is to let him do it.
In a campaign video, Trump said that he planned to reclaim higher education from “the radical left:”
“Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working taxpayers… And now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America.” The goal, Mr. Trump declared, is to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”
But as the Dunning school proves, Columbia—like the rest of the Ivy League—has always been tasked with producing knowledge to qualify the Empire’s expansion and its dispossession of racialized groups especially.
While there are some exceptions—Columbia was the home of the late Edward Said, as one example, who developed the concept of Orientalism to explain the West’s cultural reproductions of its predations—America’s brand of scholarship is decidedly anti-intellectual and intended to undermine de-colonizing resistance movements from Gotham to Gaza by flattering the white settler rather than studying him. In this fashion, the Dunning Boys, as they were colloquially known, were no different from the Chicago Boys, a coterie of economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, whose macroeconomic neoliberal economic policies helped Wall Street pilfer financial resources from Chilean workers, dramatically widening inequality in that country following the 1973 military coup organized by the Nixon administration.
It is reminiscent of the Dark Ages when knowledge production was subordinate to the politics of the throne or the church, or both. While vastly overstated, Europe’s Enlightenment era freed scholars to engage in serious study without fear or favor. The retired law professor Franke said on Democracy Now that Trump’s penalizing of Columbia—combined with Paul Weiss, the blue-chip Manhattan law firm that last week struck a deal with the White House to avoid sanctions—were intended as trial balloons to test the limits of his ability to silence dissent on college campuses. Neither bodes well for the future of free speech in the U.S., she said.
And I think, you know… we need to buckle our seat belts. Things are about to get a lot worse in April and in May, because this administration knows that it can get away with an awful lot of conduct and chilling speech and authoritarian governance with very little resistance from institutional actors, like universities as powerful, we thought, as Columbia or law firms that we thought were as powerful as Paul Weiss. So, these actions are designed to sort of test the water: How far can we go? And they now know they can go all the way.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama’s Postracial America.